Item weighted Kemeny distance for preference data

Preference data represent a particular type of ranking data where a group of people gives their preferences over a set of alternatives. The traditional metrics between rankings don’t take into account that the importance of elements can be not uniform. In this paper the item weighted Kemeny distance is introduced and its properties demonstrated

Da D\ufcsseldorf a Lussemburgo e ritorno: \u201cTowards Horizontal Effect For the Free Movement of Goods?\u201d

A seguito di rinvio pregiudiziale deciso da CGUE 12 luglio 2012 C-171/11, Fra.bo/DVGW, che ammette, per la prima volta, l\u2019efficacia orizzontale, e cio\ue8 nei rapporti privatistici, del principio della libera circolazione delle merci, gi\ue0 affermata dalla giurisprudenza europea per le altre libert\ue0 fondamentali di circolazione (CGUE 12 luglio 2012 C-171/11, Fra.bo/DVGW, in European Review of Contract Law, 2013, 186, con commento di Harm SHEPEL; nonch\ue9, H. van HARTEN, T. NAUTA, Towards Horizontal Direct Effect For the Free Movement of Goods. Comment on Fra.Bo., in European Law Review, 2013, 677; SHUIBHNE, The Coherence of EU Free Movement Law. Consitutional Responsibility and the Court of Justice, Oxford, 2013), con sentenza 14 agosto 2013 i giudici di seconda istanza di D\ufcsseldorf hanno applicato il citato principio di diritto nel giudizio a quo. In sostanza, la libert\ue0 di circolazione delle merci avrebbe come destinatari non solo gli stati membri, ma anche i soggetti privati, le cui condotte sarebbero dunque sindacabili dal giudice alla stregua delle misure degli Stati membri. Sin qui si era soltanto ammesso l\u2019effetto verticale, e cio\ue8 la possibilit\ue0 di sindacare la misura statale lesiva della libert\ue0 di circolazione, e comunque, quanto alle condotte private (ad es. distruzione di prodotti agricoli importati da altro stato membro, blocco delle strade da parte degli autotrasportatori) si era ritenuto che solo lo Stato potesse essere chiamato a rispondere per non aver impedito dal condotta del soggetto privato

The Role of Emotional Intelligence in Health Care Professionals Burnout

The purpose of this study is to explore the relationship between Emotional Intelligence (EI) and burnout in health care professionals. More specifically, this survey has the purpose of demonstrating the role of EI as a protective factor against the risk of burnout. Health professionals (doctors, nurses, and other caregivers) composed the sample. Data, collected during professional training, provided 148 employees. Major results of this survey underline the relationship between EI and burnout. As we expected, there is a negative and significant correlation between burnout and Emotional Intelligence. Moreover, burnout varies depending on length of service: burnout increases between 5 and 10 years of experience and decreases over 10 years. Indeed, burnout is differently expressed amongst healthcare professionals: more specifically, Psycho-physical exhaustion, Detriment of the relationships and Burnout (total score) has an impact on physician (doctors) more than other investigated health professionals. These findings seem to suggest the opportunity to improve Emotional Intelligence abilities through specific training programs, useful to promote the ability to cope with stress and to enrich the relationships in the workplace

Clustering Imputation for Air Pollution Data

Air pollution is a global problem. The assessment of air pollution concentration data is important for evaluating human exposure and the associated risk to health. Unfortunately, air pollution monitoring stations often have periods of missing data or do not measure all pollutants. In this study, we experiment with different approaches to estimate the whole time series for a missing pollutant at a monitoring station as well as missing values within a time series. The main goal is to reduce the uncertainty in air quality assessment. To develop our approach we combine single and multiple imputation, nearest neighbour geographical distance methods and a clustering algorithm for time series. For each station that measures ozone, we produce various imputations for this pollutant and measure the similarity/error between the imputed and the real values. Our results show that imputation by average based on clustering results combined with multiple imputation for missing values is the most reliable and is associated with lower average error and standard deviation

DNA Repair in Human Pluripotent Stem Cells Is Distinct from That in Non-Pluripotent Human Cells

The potential for human disease treatment using human pluripotent stem cells, including embryonic stem cells and induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), also carries the risk of added genomic instability. Genomic instability is most often linked to DNA repair deficiencies, which indicates that screening/characterization of possible repair deficiencies in pluripotent human stem cells should be a necessary step prior to their clinical and research use. In this study, a comparison of DNA repair pathways in pluripotent cells, as compared to those in non-pluripotent cells, demonstrated that DNA repair capacities of pluripotent cell lines were more heterogeneous than those of differentiated lines examined and were generally greater. Although pluripotent cells had high DNA repair capacities for nucleotide excision repair, we show that ultraviolet radiation at low fluxes induced an apoptotic response in these cells, while differentiated cells lacked response to this stimulus, and note that pluripotent cells had a similar apoptotic response to alkylating agent damage. This sensitivity of pluripotent cells to damage is notable since viable pluripotent cells exhibit less ultraviolet light-induced DNA damage than do differentiated cells that receive the same flux. In addition, the importance of screening pluripotent cells for DNA repair defects was highlighted by an iPSC line that demonstrated a normal spectral karyotype, but showed both microsatellite instability and reduced DNA repair capacities in three out of four DNA repair pathways examined. Together, these results demonstrate a need to evaluate DNA repair capacities in pluripotent cell lines, in order to characterize their genomic stability, prior to their pre-clinical and clinical use

Human embryonic stem cells: preclinical perspectives

Human embryonic stem cells (hESCs) have been extensively discussed in public and scientific communities for their potential in treating diseases and injuries. However, not much has been achieved in turning them into safe therapeutic agents. The hurdles in transforming hESCs to therapies start right with the way these cells are derived and maintained in the laboratory, and goes up-to clinical complications related to need for patient specific cell lines, gender specific aspects, age of the cells, and several post transplantation uncertainties. The different types of cells derived through directed differentiation of hESC and used successfully in animal disease and injury models are described briefly. This review gives a brief outlook on the present and the future of hESC based therapies, and talks about the technological advances required for a safe transition from laboratory to clinic